Salt, Salmon and Smoke Part 2

Twelve hours after salting, Ole prepares the salmon for the smokehouse. It’s a careful, intuitive process and each stage affects the final taste and texture of the salmon. Ole calls it a soft process. He fixes the anchor points in each fillet of salmon, hangs them on hooks and then rinses them off one by one. Once the water drips off the fish they are taken into the smoking chamber.

Ole’s grandfather believed that the movement of the salmon in the ‘wind’ of the smokehouse affected the enzymes and proteins and helped the flavour to migrate through the flesh. They are smoked in a mixture of beech and juniper - the beech is for the sweetness and the juniper is for the poetry. This seems to us to be an essential part of the craft – the romance of the process has an indefinable influence on the end product. Many brands spend years manufacturing this but here in this smokehouse it just happens.